Monthly Archives: February 2012

Media focus on the BRICS[1] in February 2012 was anything but flattering. As the Syrian regime increased the campaign of violence against its own people, China and Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution on 4 February (not for the first time).

Days later they were again out of step with the rest of the world, in the company of North Korea, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, when they voted against a UN General Assembly resolution on 16 February condemning the human rights violations in Syria.

Just three days earlier Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, outlined to the General Assembly in shocking detail human rights abuses in Syria, including a harrowing report that “Children have not been spared. Children have been killed by beating, sniper fire and shelling from Government security forces … As of the end of January security forces have killed more than 400 children”.

Syria is a fragile (and failed) state – the type of state that has since 9/11 risen to the top of the international development agenda – both for security and development concerns. For as the World Bank states in its 2011 World Development Report, no fragile state is in line to meet a single of the Millennium Development Goals; fragile states cast strong negative economic spillovers onto their neighbours – “Countries lose an estimated 0.7 per cent of their annual GDP for each neighbour involved in civil war”.

The international community therefore has to deal with such states; they cannot be left to themselves to disintegrate into their own murderous chaos. Such intervention can take various forms – from the relatively mild censure to strong forms such as sanctions or even military intervention.

In a recent book on Fragile States that I co-edited (and which will be launched at the University of Oxford on 19 March 2012), Lisa Chauvet, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler estimate the costs of failing states to be around US$276 billion per annum. These costs may justify their national sovereignty to be overridden by international intervention.

As shown by the conflict in Syria, other recent conflicts in fragile states, as well as an increasing number of debates on global public goods (including climate change), the limits to national sovereignty is one of the most difficult and sensitive matters in international development. It is particularly so as the idea of national sovereignty may be outdated.

Jurgen Brauer and Robert Haywood, writing in the UNU-WIDER Angle state bluntly that ‘Problems of local or global governance, including violent conflict within and between states, can be ascribed not merely to the faulty exercise of state sovereignty but to its very existence’. Hence, while the international community may be slow to assist the people of Syria due to the obstructive behaviour of China and Russia, international intervention was important in 2011 to protect civilians in fragile states including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Cote d’Ivoire.

In light of this another of the BRICS – South Africa – has not had the most flattering coverage in the media. For some inexplicable reason the country is a haven for crackpots. A tragic example in its recent past was when the country became a favourite of AIDS dissidents whose ideas were supported by then president Thabo Mbeki. The consequences were dire: a “genocide by sloth” that according to Nicoli Nattrass lead to around 343,000 avoidable AIDS deaths and 171,000 infections between 1999 and 2007.

In recent weeks the country entertained another crackpot of sorts. At the country’s Mining Indaba held in Cape Town on 6 February the keynote speech was delivered by a climate change skeptic who has been reported to have described climate change as “nothing but a ruse to create a massive global bureaucracy that will rule the world with impunity” (incidentally the same week that other BRICS – China, India and Russia – objected to the EU’s carbon tax on airlines).

The country’s mining sector had perhaps hoped for more leadership and less conspiracy theorizing from the summit because it is a sector under pressure. On 16 February police had to use rubber bullets and water cannon against thousands of mine workers who protested against the retrenchment of 17,000 co-workers at one of the world’s largest platinum mines.

It may seem on the face of it a puzzle why a country with South Africa’s mineral resources has been able to achieve only mediocre economic growth during the greatest ever commodity boom, not to mention losing thousands of mining jobs. What is going on? The influence of crackpot ideas again? Perhaps: the mining sector has been threatened by nationalization. The handling of mineral rights, regulation of the sector by political interests, and nepotism has strangled investment in this sector.

An irony of the past two weeks is a public speech Mbeki made on 16 February condemning international intervention in fragile states, particularly those in Africa. He is reported to have described these (including NATOs role in Libya and the French intervention that helped arrest Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire in 2011) as ‘racism’.

Fortunately Mbeki’s opinions are not necessarily shared by the South African government. Still, it is ironic that they are made in a BRICS country at a time when other BRICS have been instrumental in limiting the world’s intervention in Syria.

Ideas are clearly important in international development. Hence the question now is: how can the world deal with fragile states in future given that the BRICS seem to prefer the idea of sovereignty to the idea of the Responsibility to Protect?

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance.

[1] BRICS is the acronym for the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80,” said car marker Henry Ford, who championed innovation till the age of 83. “Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

This is one of the goals of Third Age Online (TAO), a UNU-MERIT project which aims to keep the elderly active by engaging them online. Here “elderly” refers to anyone over the age of 50, and in some cases even over 100.

One key to building the TAO community, which already has 300,000+ members, is to help seniors help each other online, starting with practical issues like health, welfare and charity work. Another goal is to narrow the gap between generations and therefore ease social integration.

For now TAO focuses on three European countries – Germany, The Netherlands and Switzerland – but it is designed to be transferable and provide a model for older generations around the world. In time this would include emerging economies, where rates of literacy and internet penetration are rising to workable levels.

Above all the project aims to make itself and its services visible and useful for the elderly, who may not fully grasp the interactive nature of the modern web and who typically need more accessibility options, from bigger fonts to crystal clear interfaces .

In this case awareness depends not only on the functionality of the TAO websites but also a clear understanding of what members can do and how they can benefit – hence the focus on charity, community and a growing network of mutual support.

In terms of building communities the experience of one partner stands out. Wikimedia has a great reputation for engaging people of all ages around the world in online collaborative endeavours. Its most famous product, Wikipedia, has become THE online reference tool and the most successful crowdsourcing project of all time, attracting some 350 million unique visitors per month.

Together with project partners like SeniorWeb, as well as Dutch and German universities, TAO is boiling down its combined knowledge into a handbook. A draft version is available below and more updates will be posted in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

Ultimately TAO is building the most user-friendly, accessible and engaging platforms: everything from the most logical user interfaces to surveys, workshops and photo competitions. This means giving the elderly a stake in the project and building a community with their active participation. It means adopting a positive rather than a patronizing approach and accepting that even the slickest of wizz-kids can learn from their older counterparts.

The project runs for three years from October 2010 to September 2013, and has around 3 million euros in funding. Around a half of that is drawn from the European Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme. The project is run from UNU-MERIT by Ruediger Glott and Stijn Bannier, who appears in the audio interview below. Click play to listen in or read on for more details from project coordinator Stijn Bannier.

TAO Q&A– Who attends TAO workshops?
Bannier: The project workshops aim to attract senior organizations, online communities, and of course the combination of online senior communities. This currently involves online senior communities (SeniorWeb Switzerland and the Netherlands) and Wikimedia’s (Switzerland and Germany), which organize their own workshops on how to actively engage seniors online. For example I will be attending a workshop given by SeniorWeb.NL on social networks (Facebook, Hyves, Twitter, Schoolbank, etc.), where I’ll observe how senior teachers are trained and how teachers then train SeniorWeb members.

– What are the specific needs of seniors? What are the challenges? Bannier: A study of early users over 60 years old found they are often frustrated by the usability of online communities, i.e. layout, accessibility, and related barriers. These barriers tend to create negative emotions in early users which are then attributed to the online community as a whole. So efforts to motivate older people to join have to address existing counterarguments and stereotypes. Most helpful are positive role models who share the same values, beliefs, interests, age, and level of education with potential new community members. People they can relate to. This approach requires a detailed definition of the target group so that persuasive messages can be tailored accordingly. Simple exposure to an online community is not sufficient for motivation and integration. We need to carefully match personal interests and desires with the online community.

– What do you mean by a “model for older generations around the world”?
SB: ‘Example’ might be a better word. Since the three involved countries are ahead in the area of digital inclusion, innovation and the developing online senior communities, the project partners can offer best practices for other countries, where on the one hand digital inclusion is still an issue and on the other hand aging is not yet an issue.

– Can you give an outline of the handbook?Bannier: It will be a handbook for online-communities and operators of community platforms, containing effective strategies for improved inclusion of older persons in online communities (with a focus on older persons’ motivation and inclusion). You can follow the online creation of the handbook (and a first draft outline) here.

– Are you making use of data collection studies for accessibility, usability labs, or persona defining?Bannier: Regarding accessibility and usability, Subproject 2 (software development) of the project is looking into a number of potentially useful aspects.

– How is TAO different from other initiatives like UrbAct or GetYourFolksonline?Bannier: Where the latter two initiatives aim at getting seniors online, our project aims at engaging them online. TAO focuses on developing and rolling out measures to promote older persons’ participation in online communities. Thus, activating, engaging and mobilizing online seniors to make the most of Web 2.0 and all the possibilities of user-generated content, interaction and participation.